Nginx is now the most popular web server, overtaking Apache • Hacker News Board

Re: Nginx is now the most popular web server, overtaking Apache

#31

Post by hu3 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

franga2000 wrote: post #23

hu3 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't read too much into that. nginx is good at serving dynamic content too. Simple setup with uwsgi for Python and php-fpm for PHP.

I think both fpm and wsgi would fall under what OP called "proxying to application servers", despite using a different protocol. Yes it's technically "serving", but so is proxying and literally anything else a "server" does. Maybe "hosting" is a better term: both can serve any content, including dynamic, but apache can often host it as well (without an external server), which nginx can't do nearly as well.

No, I'm addressing this point where OP says nginx is only good at serving static content. See "really just good" here:

> Considering nginx is really just good at serving static content...

That's not correct at all. Regardless of how the request handled, serving dynamic content on nginx is trivial.

Re: Nginx is now the most popular web server, overtaking Apache

#32

Post by TechBro8615 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 8:54 PM UTC

franga2000 wrote: post #27

mort96 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So because FPM isn't running in-process, nginx "nginx is really just good at serving static content"...? That makes literally no sense to me.

> Considering nginx is really just good at serving static content(maybe CDN uses it a lot) and the rest are all proxying The English is a bit broken in the top-level comment, but both static content and proxying are clearly mentioned as "nginx things", which is entirely fair. If you don't consider proxying to be included under the term "serving" (which is entirely reasonable and not uncommon) this is entirely true -…

Just wait, we're going to come back around full circle once someone embeds a WebAssembly runtime into nginx/openresty, and then someone else makes a framework for defining "edge functions" to run inside that runtime.

This is basically what CloudFlare Workers does already.

Re: Nginx is now the most popular web server, overtaking Apache

#33

Post by franga2000 » Wed, May 05, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

hu3 wrote: post #31

franga2000 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think both fpm and wsgi would fall under what OP called "proxying to application servers", despite using a different protocol. Yes it's technically "serving", but so is proxying and literally anything else a "server" does. Maybe "hosting" is a better term: both can serve any content, including dynamic, but apache can often host it as well (without an external server), which nginx can't do nearly as well.

No, I'm addressing this point where OP says nginx is only good at serving static content. See "really just good" here: > Considering nginx is really just good at serving static content... That's not correct at all. Regardless of how the request handled, serving dynamic content on nginx is trivial.

What about the rest of that sentence? The way I read it (admittedly, the English is broken, so it isn't entirely clear what they meant) was that nginx is only good at "serving" static content, while the rest of what it does is proxying, not "serving". In that case, where a distinction is intentionally made between "serving" and "proxying", taking request for dynamic content and just shooting them off to an application server like uwsgi wouldn't be considered "serving".

Taking this logic to the extreme, socat is also very good at serving dynamic content:

  $ socat TCP-LISTEN:80,fork,reuseaddr TCP:127.0.0.1:8080 # Make sure Gunicorn is running on port 8080 to handle incoming requests